Why is WoW $15 a month?

[Dracullus]

That argument has no merit considering both ff14 and WoW have cash shops that are arguably just as greedy if not worse

Aha.

You just can't survive a day without writing some bullshit that anyone can check in 10 seconds, don't you.

[justandulas]

Aha.

You just can't survive a day without writing some bullshit that anyone can check in 10 seconds, don't you.

What do you think that proves exactly? Eso doesn’t offer a subs and sales homes? Considering how ff14 housing is done, I think many prefer the eso model

Secondly, eso doesn’t require a sub while ff14/WoW both do. You can’t rip eso for a cash shop while ignoring the grotesque cash shops in WoW and ff14

Eso doesn’t have to try and bribe players into 6 month subs for “special” mounts or homes, either

That’s called checkmate, and you lost this debate

[Lolites]

The current in-the-toilet pop numbers scream otherwise.

we dont have those since WOD...
so if something screams in your head its not pop numbers

- - - Updated - - -

People are all giving the same answer but it's a fair question. Hosting rates have dropped drastically since WoW was released. The server maintenance is trivial compared what it used to be and it doesn't seem like WoW's network bandwidth per player has increased that much either.

their team also grew bigger, and those people surely get higher salaries than in 2004 (even if they risen only by inflation), im pretty sure their costs of wow production are much higher than on 2004, yet the sub price is (more or less) the same for those 17 years...

[Dracullus]

What do you think that proves exactly? Eso doesn’t offer a subs and sales homes? Considering how ff14 housing is done, I think many prefer the eso model

Secondly, eso doesn’t require a sub while ff14/WoW both do. You can’t rip eso for a cash shop while ignoring the grotesque cash shops in WoW and ff14

Eso doesn’t have to try and bribe players into 6 month subs for “special” mounts or homes, either

That’s called checkmate, and you lost this debate

Aha. So WoW/FF14 have bigger shop than ESO because they have subs. Comparing actual amount of stuff in both shops to determine which is bigger is so retro.

I see, like always, when someone try to play chess with you, you throw out board and start jumping on the table.

[Lolites]

Why does the subscription exist? Does anyone really know?

they charge sub, bcs they are not charity, they make the game to get profit, and they deemed subscription model to be best option, thats it... there is literaly nothing else behind that just basic logic...
when you go to shop to buy socks, do you ask the cashier, or other customers WHY the socks cost idk 5 bucks?

[justandulas]

Aha. So WoW/FF14 have bigger shop than ESO because they have subs. Comparing actual amount of stuff in both shops to determine which is bigger is so retro.

I see, like always, when someone try to play chess with you, you throw out board and start jumping on the table.

You are just a sore loser and try to spin a debate into one where you can delude yourself into thinking you won something, when you really got clobbered so bad they'd have stopped the "fight" if we were debating in public.

Secondly, yes a game having a cash shop WITH a sub is worse. There's no 2 ways around this. IF you have a sub fee, and a shop on top of that.... you are automatically worse than any f2p/b2p game that survives off COSMETIC HOUSE items in a shop. You know, housing, that thing that the MAJORITY of wow players have been asking for for years? Just wait until blizz puts it in and it's 100% cash shop.... on top of your sub.

FF14 doesn't get a pass for this either, their shop is absolutely putrid in terms of selling EVERY DAMN THING they can. Cosmetics? on the shop. Best mounts in game, you guessed it the shop. Wanna skip the boring crap? Shop for it. You want the best home decorations? Crack that wallet open again.

WoW players have no room to bash any games cash shops as long as Blizzard's is so transparently greedy, on top of a box sale and a sub.

So yes, checkmate again. You lost, give it up. Having a sub fee AUTOMATICALLY makes a cash shop in game worse. FF14 and WoW are both guilty of this sin.

[Ivarr]

their team also grew bigger, and those people surely get higher salaries than in 2004 (even if they risen only by inflation), im pretty sure their costs of wow production are much higher than on 2004, yet the sub price is (more or less) the same for those 17 years...

Your point on inflation is valid. Blizzard only locally increased the price for certain countries but their main user base is still paying the same price all these years. Which means that inflation-corrected, WoW has actually gotten cheaper to play over time.

Increasing the budget however isn't a reason to increase the price. The only thing that determines the price is the supply and the demand. The supply of a digital product is limitless so what really determines the price of the subscription is the demand. Demand that has wildly fluctuated from quarter to quarter.

What I'm meaning to say is, if you're developing a digital product, then the budget you allocate to its development is based on the estimated growth that this better development will provide. It gets even complicated on products that benefit from the network effect where companies gladly run at a loss for years on end as long as they keep growing their userbase (and avoid taxes on their profit).

So it may be true that WoW's budget has increased, I'm not completely sure, but it's the most likely scenario. This increase however is then made with the intention of growing the playerbase in the future. In a similar vein, the budget of HotS has been reduced to almost maintenance level because Blizzard gave up on trying to grow that playerbase.

This is why it wouldn't make sense to increase the subscription price based on how much Blizzard invests in the game. They're hoping that their investment will attract more people willing to pay the same price rather than the same people willing to pay more for it. The latter group, the people who are willing to pay more for WoW are enticed with the vanity items in the shop.

[Lolites]

I paid full price for all seven of those expansions. Same price any other full game would cost. Why the subscription on top of it?

did you? cause wow SL costs 40euro, while most "other full games" cost 50-60e or even more where i live...
and why the sub on top... well how many of those "other full games" actualy get "free" patches of the size of wow patches?

[Lolites]

Increasing the budget however isn't a reason to increase the price.

and i never said it is, or that they should increase sub price or whatever, that was just note to the cheaper server maintenance cost and whatnot, yes, several aspects might get cheaper , but several get WAY more expensive, so obviously they kept the sub...

[Fitsu]

Why does the subscription exist? Does anyone really know?

I understand you don't have to play if you don't want to. But, I'm genuinely asking. I don't understand why it exists.

I understand it provides more income for them and people pay it. They're also not the only game doing it. FF14 does for example.

It made sense to me in 2004, when it was assumed it was helping to pay for the servers, which were "special" to accommodate the massive populations and remarkable for the time. It was also assumed it would be to pay for steady content updates.

But, they need content updates or no one will play, which makes it kind of weird that we're funding them monthly in part to make content, they need to make anyway to keep people playing to buy store mounts, services, and keep interest in the game for future box sales.

Am I missing something? Is it really just to access the game? Does it make sense?

Update:

We’ve gotten an answer that claims it’s in the EULA that you’re paying to access to the game. I haven’t verified that, but I’ll assume for now it’s true.

We haven’t gotten an official answer as to “why” we’re paying monthly for access to the game yet.

If anyone has anything solid (not your opinion) such as, but not limited to, dev interview, official posts, even dev Twitter post, post it.

Thanks.

I don't really understand the question, what do you by why? Why does anything cost money, it's so the company selling it can make money?

Does it makes sense? I mean yes? They are paying for server infrastructure and employees to create content updates so given the game has a constant cost to run/update it makes sense for them to want a constant flow of income to upkeep that. There aren't gonna be that many more box sales.

[cateran100]

I don't really understand the question, what do you by why? Why does anything cost money, it's so the company selling it can make money?

Does it makes sense? I mean yes? They are paying for server infrastructure and employees to create content updates so given the game has a constant cost to run/update it makes sense for them to want a constant flow of income to upkeep that. There aren't gonna be that many more box sales.

Have you ever give a thought about how f2p online games exist? PoE for example? How can Diablo 3 exist?

[Daedius]

I avoid F2P games like the plague... absolutely despise the business model.

[Asrialol]

yea, there will always be some morons who paying for this shit show.

They're not morons, but a lot of them are addicts. Even you are, since you're clearly not playing but still shitpost about the game here, even showing hostility towards people who play.

In short; addicts.

I love how OP has decided that there is no right answer unless it comes directly from Blizzard. They decided on a sub based business model and hasn't seen a reason to change it. That's not my opinion, it's a fact, and the answer to this thread.

I love threads where OP asks an obvious rhetorical question and denies any answers that gets posted. OP doesn't feel the sub cost is warranted and thus tries to argue there must be some absurd reason for it that nobody but Blizzard can answer.

In short; addicts.

[Resheph]

You are just a sore loser and try to spin a debate into one where you can delude yourself into thinking you won something, when you really got clobbered so bad they'd have stopped the "fight" if we were debating in public.

Secondly, yes a game having a cash shop WITH a sub is worse. There's no 2 ways around this. IF you have a sub fee, and a shop on top of that.... you are automatically worse than any f2p/b2p game that survives off COSMETIC HOUSE items in a shop. You know, housing, that thing that the MAJORITY of wow players have been asking for for years? Just wait until blizz puts it in and it's 100% cash shop.... on top of your sub.

FF14 doesn't get a pass for this either, their shop is absolutely putrid in terms of selling EVERY DAMN THING they can. Cosmetics? on the shop. Best mounts in game, you guessed it the shop. Wanna skip the boring crap? Shop for it. You want the best home decorations? Crack that wallet open again.

WoW players have no room to bash any games cash shops as long as Blizzard's is so transparently greedy, on top of a box sale and a sub.

So yes, checkmate again. You lost, give it up. Having a sub fee AUTOMATICALLY makes a cash shop in game worse. FF14 and WoW are both guilty of this sin.

This is amazing. You are wrong of course, but I cannot get over the fact that your self esteem must be so low that you actually think calling yourself the winner of a debate is a sign of strength or intelligence.

In any case, what the original point was by Dracullus: The ESO cash shop is filled with things designed to be bought and purposefully not made available in other ways. This is a valid way of doing things, nobody was saying it wasn't so your little tantrum was totally misplaced. Buy to play is one model, subscription is another. Don't forget ESO started out that way. But it's clear that ESO's shop is totally different from WOW's in scope.

[Spikeychris]

Over the years I've probably spend about £1000 on WoW and for that £1000 I've got >9800 hours played. So that's what 10p per hour of play time? That's a fucking bargain lol.

The sub fee exists so they have a constant flow of money to produce a constant flow of content (which 9.1 pandemic delay issues aside they do a reasonable job of).

[Crimson Spears]

It was grand fathered in with a playerbase used to its sub fee. If it was a new product I doubt it would be as expensive though I don't think it would ever be ftp

[Amnaught]

did you? cause wow SL costs 40euro, while most "other full games" cost 50-60e or even more where i live...
and why the sub on top... well how many of those "other full games" actualy get "free" patches of the size of wow patches?

I don't think 9.1 was worth 7 months of a $15 subscription. I don't think anyone does. If Chains of Domination was DLC I'd say it was worth 20 bucks on its own. I "bought" it, yeah, but let's not pretend we're not getting a shitty deal.

[Asrialol]

I don't think 9.1 was worth 7 months of a $15 subscription. I don't think anyone does. If Chains of Domination was DLC I'd say it was worth 20 bucks on its own. I "bought" it, yeah, but let's not pretend we're not getting a shitty deal.

Then dont pay. Why the fuck would you pay for something you don't think is worth it? What the actual..

Addiction is real I guess.

That being said, people on here seem to think that the sub cost is so significant. It really isn't, Im sure there's lots of players out there that don't bother unsubbing even if they dont actively play. Kinda like paying for Netflix without using it at least once every month.

[epigramx]

If paying 15 dollars every 30 days for this is a problem, microtransactions are 900 times more of a problem. It used to be that they had to actually bring new players into the game because subs were nearly 100% of the income but now they don't have to; they can milk children with addiction problems; or they can milk people with sunk-cost fallacies.

[Lolites]

In short; addicts.

or, and bear with me, people who actualy ENJOY the game!
imagine that, not everybody shares the views of some forum shitposters that the game is bad and some people actualy enjoy it, and think 50cents a day is realy steal...